Scaling Time Warp-based Discrete Event Execution to 10⁴ Processors on Blue Gene Supercomputer

Conference · Mon Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2007

OSTI ID:931733

Perumalla, Kalyan S ^[1]

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1. ORNL

Lately, important large-scale simulation applications, such as emergency/event planning and response, are emerging that are based on discrete event models. The applications are characterized by their scale (several millions of simulated entities), their fine-grained nature of computation (microseconds per event), and their highly dynamic inter-entity event interactions. The desired scale and speed together call for highly scalable parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) engines. However, few such parallel engines have been designed or tested on platforms with thousands of processors. Here an overview is given of a unique PDES engine that has been designed to support Time Warp-style optimistic parallel execution as well as a more generalized mixed, optimistic-conservative synchronization. The engine is designed to run on massively parallel architectures with minimal overheads. A performance study of the engine is presented, including the first results to date of PDES benchmarks demonstrating scalability to as many as 16,384 processors, on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The results show, for the first time, the promise of effectively sustaining very large scale discrete event execution on up to 10⁴ processors.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• Sponsoring Organization: ORNL LDRD Director's R&D
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 931733
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
BENCHMARKS
ENGINES
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PERFORMANCE
PLANNING
SIMULATION
SUPERCOMPUTERS
SYNCHRONIZATION